The local election results were a triumph for Nigel Farage as well as being a modest success for Rupert Lowe. The Tories improved from 2025 levels but are still below those of 2024, so any optimism needs to be tempered. Beyond these headlines it is worth looking at the details of the national vote, and what that would have meant in terms of seats had it been a general election.

I have taken my figures from Thrasher and Rawlins, who have an excellent track record on converting local results into national ones, and published them in The Sunday Times this weekend. They calculate that if these results were replicated in a general election, then Reform would come top with 27% of the popular vote, with the Tories second on 20%. Labour is estimated to secure 15%, with both the Lib Dems and the Greens on 14%.

From these figures, no one party would have enough seats in the House of Commons to form a majority on its own. More importantly, even if by some fluke 27% were translated into a majority, it could never be a mandate. Sir Keir Starmer has clearly suffered from winning a mere 33% of the vote, in spite of his huge 170-seat majority. Although legally Parliament is sovereign, if a party has no mandate, it lacks the moral authority to pursue major change. Political reality is greater than the rules, because Parliament is made up of individuals and, especially in the Commons, MPs are conscious of the voters’ will.

This means that Starmer’s majority has been able to do very little as MPs are reluctant to support policies that are not popular in their constituencies. This is especially true for MPs with small majorities who feel that they cannot alienate any pressure group, however small. It is much easier to be brave with a majority of 20,000 than of 200. Thus, the vote share matters hugely for a party looking to be radical, which Reform has to be to fulfil its purpose. 27% or even 33% is simply not enough to achieve its ambitions.

However, in coalition with the Conservatives, this begins to change. Sky News forecasts that the local election results would have returned 284 Reform members and 96 Tories, so 380 altogether, or a majority of 110. This would be enough to put Nigel Farage into 10 Downing Street, and would create a stable, philosophically aligned government.

Consider the alternative. The only other majority would be if the Tories joined a rainbow coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and the Nationalists. This would be idiotic. A grand coalition to keep out Reform would simply not be supported by the majority of Conservatives, and would make the country feel cheated.

Hence, if it looks likely that the next election will produce a result that will lead to a Reform-Conservative coalition after the voting has taken place, why not prepare for it in advance? It is more honest, and offers the electorate a chance to vote for a unified platform agreed before the election, rather than a compromise cooked up afterwards.

It would give the new government a mandate for real change, which is sorely needed. As David Starkey has argued, there has to be a restoration. The constitutional clock needs to be put back to 1972 with government by the King in Parliament once again. The Supreme Court needs to be moved back into the House of Lords, and the Human Rights Act and membership of the European Convention of Human Rights must end. The Climate Change Act must be repealed, as must the 2010 Equalities Act and the Constitutional Reform and Government Act.

This needs a government with a large majority and a mandate for action, which the combination of the Tories and Reform would have. This would be enhanced by a pre-election deal, because the majority would be bigger and the electorate would know what to expect.

The logic of this seems compelling. It pre-empts the probable result where neither party is in a position to get to 40% on its own. Reform, for all its success, has not advanced from last year, and the Tories, even though Kemi Badenoch is the most popular leader of a party, is still polling at a lower level than in 2024.

This raises the question of what type of deal could be done, and there are historic examples. In the late 1880s, Conservatives did not oppose, in most cases, the Liberal Unionists, who then supported a Conservative administration. This was fairly informal and did not work in every constituency.

A better example is the 1918 coupon election, where Lloyd George and Bonar Law, for their respective parties, gave a letter of support or “coupon” to either a Lloyd George Liberal or a coalition Conservative candidate. Again, this did not work in all seats, but it held pretty widely and ensured that Lloyd George remained Prime Minister until 1922 on the back of Tory votes after the election.

In any coalition, it is worth learning one thing from David Cameron, which is that to make it work, the bigger party has to be generous. In this case, on current polls, Reform would be the bigger party. It would need to be generous by offering a coupon to all sitting Tory MPs. It would be invidious for a Tory leader to refuse a coupon to an incumbent, and although one or two existing and not very conservative Tory MPs might refuse, most would accept and it would create a basis for trust.

However, after this initial act of generosity, Reform would expect to win the bulk of seats in getting to the target of 325 and a majority. This would need to be done by analysing each seat to see who had the best chance. It is obvious that Reform can win in parts of the country where the Conservatives cannot. The Red Wall, where it has done so well in the recent local elections, is a clear example. It is also doing well in East Anglia and the Midlands. Any deal would have to recognise this, but equally, Reform’s chances in more Remain supporting areas are less good. So in Surrey and Oxfordshire, it would need to be a Conservative candidate.

Essentially, the two leaders would need to decide between them which seats each side would take. This would be helpful to Reform, which would then not need to find so many candidates, with the risk of selecting ones with reputational difficulties, which has been its besetting problem, as it is for all new parties.

To make this pact work, Tories must give up the silly nonsense of saying that Reform is not a right-wing party. For former members of a government which supported an earlier but equally left-wing version of the Renters’ Rights Act, this demands an ideological purity that they themselves never managed.

It is fanciful to think that only 20% of voters are basically Conservative, the 27% who support Reform are not left-wing, and those who assume they or their party hold such views are simply deluding themselves.

There are still a few tickets left for the last two shows of my Mogg, Unbuttoned tour.

Tour dates:

Tue 19 May – Lincoln

Sun 24 May – Winchester

I would be delighted if you would join me — you can find out more and book your tickets at jacobreesmogglive.com.

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If you missed the earlier installments, you can find them here:

Part IV: From conception to First Reading - how a Bill is created

Part III: The Glorious Revolution - Parliament takes con…

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Currently, a variety of electoral systems operate in the United Kingdom. The best known, First-past-the-post (FPTP), is used for parliamentary elections to Westminster and for local elections in England. However, the Scottish and Welsh parliaments use different mechanisms, which I thought were worth exploring.

Scotland uses an Additional Member system, resulting in a mixture of constituency MSPs and ‘additional members’. The constituency MSPs initially covered the same area as a Westminster MP, but this changed in 2005 when the number of seats in the United Kingdom Parliament from Scotland was cut from 73 to 59 as a result of boundary reforms. Scotland wanted to keep 73 MSPs, so the constituencies ceased to overlap. These seats return MSPs on the basis of a FPTP system.

However, on top of the 73 constituency MSPs, there are 56 additional members who are elected on a regional basis. Thus, each elector has two votes, one for a constituency and the other for a region. For this purpose, Scotland, is divided into eight regions, each of which returns seven additional members.

In the constituency seats, voters select an individual who represents a party (Independents can stand, but have not normally been successful). In the regional vote, people vote exclusively for a party which will have an advertised list of candidates for all the places available. Constituency candidates may also be on the regional list, so parties can ensure that their favoured people have a high chance of being elected. The additional members are determined by the D’Hondt system of proportional representation.

Victor D’Hondt, who devised this eponymous system, was a Belgian lawyer, so perhaps, other than Hercule Poirot and Tintin, the most famous Belgian. He developed it to deal with political instability and perceived unfairness in the Belgian electoral process. FPTP was favouring the Catholic and Conservative Party against the liberals and emerging socialists, while also distorting the balance between Belgian’s different linguistic communities. His proposals were not implemented immediately - he devised them in 1878, but they were only accepted in the two years before his death in 1901.

D’Hondt, while a proportional system, still favours larger parties to some degree, but it usually makes it hard for a single party to win an outright majority. In the case of Scotland, the SNP is usually in coalition with the Greens, although historically it has also shared power with the Lib Dems and even won outright at its high point of popularity.

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The Agricultural Revolution was the cause of more change in Britain than almost any other event. Its consequences are still felt today and, although it had many fathers, one of the most influential was Jethro Tull, although his name is probably, I fear, best known today as that of a rock group, rather than that of a great reformer.

Tull was baptised on 30 March 1674, and was the son of Jethro and Dorothy Tull. They owned land on the borders between Berkshire and Oxfordshire, and the young Jethro went to St John’s College, Oxford, in 1691.

After that, he went to the Inns of Court, but he did not practise law, and was intending to become a politician. Instead, because of poor health, he devoted his years to farming the family land, which he claimed he did extremely successfully, even though, as he wrote in the preface to the Second Edition of Horse Hoeing Husbandry, “almost all my life has been a continued sickness”. It was perhaps fortunate that Tull did not follow a political path, for he seemed a very thin-skinned man, who lashed out at critics in later life.

Tull’s private life does not seem to have been especially happy, and he may well have been rather melancholic by nature. He married, in 1699, a lady called Susanna Smith, by whom he had four daughters and a son, John. His son was a severe disappointment, who died in 1764 as a bankrupt in the Fleet Prison, which was the notorious Debtor’s Prison. Tull was clearly aware of his son’s failings as he had bailed him out during his lifetime and left almost all his estate to his daughters, save one shilling, five new pence in modern money, to his son.

In 1709, he moved to a farm near Hungerford named Prosperous, but after two years travelled abroad for his health. This allowed him to study farming methods in both France and Italy, so that when he returned, he copied the approach of pulverising the earth rather than manuring it, which he had seen practised in the vineyards in the Languedoc. He tried it on turnips, potatoes and wheat at Prosperous Farm. This allowed him to grow wheat on the same ground for thirteen years without either manure or fallow periods.

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It has become clear that Sir Keir Starmer is incapable of carrying out the role of Prime Minister. It is too big for him, and he seems neither to have the drive nor the intellect to fulfil his responsibilities. Yet he clings on as if he were a limpet.

Since the war, ten prime ministers have left office when their party was in charge, and were replaced by a new leader without a general election. These ten are Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, May, Johnson and Truss. Given the current political situation, I thought it would be interesting to consider whether there were any common factors that ensured that they went, or was each circumstance different?

Wilson is clearly an exception. He went of his own free will, a fact considered so extraordinary for any politician that a whole welter of conspiracy theories have grown up around his reasons for going. These range from absurd ones about the security services, to a knowledge of the onset of dementia. In truth, it seems as if he felt he had done it for long enough and was of an age to retire.

The first three, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan, all resigned because of human frailty. Churchill on the grounds of age, Eden and Macmillan for health reasons. None of them really wanted to go, so the excuse was cover for something else.

Essentially, Churchill knew that he was too old and that his most senior colleagues wanted him to go and had done for some time. Eden especially had become impatient in a manner that would have been familiar to watchers of Gordon Brown fifty years later. The heir apparent unable to wait any longer. Churchill, because of the war, was allowed to go with the greatest dignity and possibly could have remained a little longer, but he had been afflicted by a major stroke and must have known his powers were failing.

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Papal claims to temporal authority reached their apogee under Pope Boniface VIII, in his papal bull Unam Sanctam. This decree stated that there was no salvation outside the Church, that those who resisted the Church, of which the Pope was sole and absolute head, resisted God, and so the temporal authority must eventually submit to the spiritual, i.e. to Pope Boniface VIII. In case of any doubt, it concluded by declaring that “we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff”.

Sadly for Boniface, this bull was not well received, and he was lucky to escape alive after the Outrage of Anagni, which was carried out by Philip IV of France’s supporters, who held the Pope captive without food or drink for three days. He died, back in Rome, just over a month later.

The truth was that the papacy could not enforce its temporal claims, so their theological accuracy, or otherwise, was merely academic. The ‘two swords’, referred to in Luke 22:38, that were the subject of so much scholastic debate, could not both be effectively wielded by the Pope.

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The consequences of Brexit are inevitably hard to judge. The counterfactual cannot be proved, so the best approach is to examine the UK against other economies. This has been done by leading Remain economists, to show Brexit-related underperformance. But they compare this country to other economies, including the United States, outside the European sphere, which have performed well not just since 2016 or 2020, depending on when you wish to start, but have consistently done better than Britain since 2008 or even 2000.

It seems to me that the more obvious comparison is to the other European economies, because it is inherently unlikely that we could have outperformed those nations had we remained in the EU, as they were our major market and suppliers. In this context, the UK’s performance is reasonably good.

Our GDP has grown by more than Germany, France and Italy since 2016, and on all measures has outperformed Germany in this period from 2020. Some of the small countries have done better than the UK, but as the German economy has historically been the driver of the EU economy, it would be surprising if we had done even better against it than we have, had we remined a member.

We do less well in GDP per capita terms, because some of our growth has come from unskilled immigrant labour, boosting the total size of the economy but not on a per person basis. Trade is the one area where the Remainers predicted the worst disaster for Britain outside the EU, but here the picture is remarkably strong. Since we voted to leave, total exports have risen by 23% in real terms, from £735 billion in 2015 to £905 billion in 2025, as noted by Emmanuel Igwe in The Critic recently.

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The hereditary peers have now been voted out of existence - the Bill removing them has received Royal Assent - and this seems a sensible time to reflect on the House of Lords, its history, and how it has changed over the many centuries of its existence.

The House of Commons has a precise date for its first meeting: 20th January 1265. Although knights representing the shires had previously been summoned to the King, it was Simon de Montfort’s decision to call Burgesses from the towns that led to the Commons as we know it. This was in response to a pressing political need - De Montfort had more support in the towns than in the shires. It was not part of a well thought through, enlightenment-style constitutional settlement.

The House of Lords has no such date, its origins are lost in the mists of time, and if you go back far enough, the Privy Council and the Lords seem to have been the same body. In the early parliaments, peers, as well as bishops and abbots, attended by writ of summons. They were called to attend the king, but did not have a right to do so, and nor did their heirs. This evolved so that peers who were summoned from 1295 were deemed to have the right to attend future parliaments, as were their heirs.

This led to an interesting quirk in the peerage, as those created by writ of summons pass by the normal laws of inheritance, while those issued by letters patent do so according to the patent. This means that generally writs of summons can pass through the female line, while patents tend to restrict it to the male line only.

The first peerage created by letters patent was by Henry VI in 1440, when he enobled the Viscount of Beaumont, with the first barony coming in 1448 to Lord Sturton. This increasingly became the norm, with no new creations by writ of summons since the 15th century.

As the way of creating peers changed, so did the composition of the house. Henry VIII was the last to summon abbots, one of whom, Abbot Whiting of Glastonbury, he infamously murdered. But bishops continued to come, and their number was finally formalised by the 1858 Bishops in the House of Lords Act.

The next change was the creation of life peerages for the judges by the 1876 Appellate Jurisdiction Act. This ensured that great legal brains could be brought into the Lords as the highest court of appeal, without creating an hereditary honour. In the 19th century, it was still considered important for a peer to be of sufficient financial standing to maintain the dignity of his peerage.

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I am delighted to announce the Mogg, Unbuttoned tour — a series of live events that will take me from the green benches of Westminster to theatres across the UK.

Tour dates:

Sat 18 Apr – Hereford (Nearly Sold Out)

Fri 8 May – Worcester

Fri 15 May – Shrewsbury (Sold Out)

Tue 19 May – Lincoln

Sun 24 May – Winchester

I would be delighted if you would join me — you can find out more and book your tickets at jacobreesmogglive.com.

You can now earn rewards by referring friends. For instance, if you can encourage three friends to subscribe, you will receive a month’s paid subscription. For more details please see the Leaderboard page.

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Your comments would be most welcome. Please click the button to join the conversation. Thank you.

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John Locke’s importance is not in what he did, but in what he thought and the consequences of what he wrote. His traditional biography is simple. He held no great offices of state, merely some minor ones, but his influence is still felt today.

Locke was born on 29th August 1632 in the village of Wrington in Somerset. He was baptised by Dr. Samuel Crooke, the rector of Wrington, on the day he was born. Crooke was a Puritan, and of interest to me because Veronica Crook, nanny to the Rees-Mogg family now for over 60 years, is his direct descendant. Both John Locke and I have been held in the arms of members of the Crook family as infants.

Locke’s parents, another John and his mother, Agnes, lived near Wrington in a hamlet called Belluton, just outside Pensford. Locke Senior supported the parliamentary cause in the Civil War, along with his neighbour, Alexander Popham, who owned the great local estate.

Although the Civil War effectively ruined the family fortune, the connexion with Popham was absolutely essential for the young Locke. Alexander Popham, as a Member of Parliament, had the right to propose a boy for Westminster School. He used this in favour of Locke, who in due time became a King’s Scholar, even though there was no King at that point, and from there gained entry to Christ Church, Oxford. This lucky chance was the one way in which Locke was able to achieve the education he needed to become influential.

After his education, the next most important aspect of Locke’s ascent was his friendship with Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Baron Ashley and later Lord Shaftesbury. Their encounter, for which there are two competing stories, seems to have been an immediate meeting of minds. Locke was utterly charmed by Ashley, who thought Locke a genius.

Ashley tempted Locke out of academic Oxford life and in to London, where at the age of thirty-five he took up residence in Ashley’s household, and it was in this house that he wrote ‘An Essay Concerning Toleration’. Ashley broadened Locke’s acquaintanceship and range of interests beyond the narrow academic clerical life that Oxford had offered him, and brought him to some degree of political attention.

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Jacob

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Privilege is a difficult word in a modern political context, but Parliamentary Privilege is a great protector, a cornerstone of the Constitution. Without it, MPs and peers cannot do their jobs, they would be beset with vexatious legal actions and would always be looking over their shoulders for fear of offending the powerful. It is worth defending as our liberties depend upon it, but it is narrowly defined as too wide a definition could lead to abuse.

Parliamentary privilege grew up historically to protect Members of both Houses as they went about their duties. From 1340 Members have been protected from ‘molestation’ when they want to enter Parliament, a point I regularly made to over-zealous security panjandrums. MPs must be free to get into the Palace because there may be an urgent vote which could be decided by one Member’s presence in the division, and agents of the Crown must not stop or in any way hinder them.

As it happens, this was an important right to maintain during the covid lockdowns, when some people wanted to ban MPs from travelling to Parliament. This would have undermined accountability, but would no doubt have made the government’s job a good deal easier.

However, free access to the precincts of Parliament is not the only or even the most important privilege, although it is an essential one. MPs benefit from freedom of speech and the protection that “the Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parlyament”.

This text from the 1689 Bill of Rights was the culmination of efforts to get the Crown to accept freedom of speech, by men such as Peter Wentworth in the reign of Elizabeth I, but it also makes a legislature effective, as it is part of the claim of Parliamentary Sovereignty.

There is no other court higher than the High Court of Parliament. The courts cannot look behind the curtain to see what has happened in either House. The Standing Orders of each House are exclusively its own business, this is called exclusive cognizance.

This was firmly established by the Bradlaugh case in 1884, where Justice Stephen quoted the great legal authority Blackstone, who wrote that “The whole of the law and custom of Parliament has its original from this one maxim, ‘that whatever matter arises concerning either House of Parliament ought to be examined, discussed, and adjudged in that House to which it relates and not elsewhere’”.

The issue at hand was that Bradlaugh had refused to take the oath to the Crown that all MPs take, because he was an atheist. Thus the Commons ordered the Serjeant-at-Arms to restrain him so that he could not take his seat. Bradlaugh maintained that the order to the Serjeant was improper, but the courts held that it was the only way of implementing the will of the House of Commons, which could not be questioned, even if it were wrong, as there were no means of appealing the Commons decision.

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Sir Keir Starmer made the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the United States and then ensured that a process was followed to fulfil his wish. The process came after the decision, not before. This much is clear from the cache of papers that has been released by the Cabinet Office in response to a demand for them by the House of Commons.

We also learn that the civil service was against Mandelson’s appointment, but that is not surprising. Although the 2010 Constitutional Reform and Governance Act allows for ambassadors to be political appointments, this rarely happens. From the perceived, if unfair, appearance of nepotism when Peter Jay was made Ambassador to the United States by Jim Callaghan, to the disaster of Mandelson, such appointments have not always gone well. Understandably, the Foreign Office also dislikes this type of appointment because it deprives them of the best jobs, which are the only ones ever handed out politically.

The civil service is also obsessed with process, both on the appointment and dismissal of Mandelson. This is evident from the papers that have been released. It is bureaucratic and long-winded. Even though the briefing note lists all Mandelson’s conflicts of interest, he was nonetheless asked to fill out a form listing them, and could have faced disciplinary measures from his line manager if in future he failed to send in even a nil return.

This is faintly absurd for a prime ministerial appointment, one that depends on maintaining the confidence of the prime minister rather than the line manager. And it is this type of bureaucracy that leads to the payoff to Mandelson once he was fired.

The Foreign Office failed to make any contractual change for a politician as opposed to a career diplomat. This meant that the issue of unfair dismissal arose, whereas the Prime Minister is free to sack any minister he chooses without this risk. Compensation is paid to ministers who are fired or who resign, but it is limited and there is no question of an industrial tribunal.

As the letter of engagement clearly states, the role of ambassador is a crown appointment and as such is not subject to a notice period. The contract could have been different. All ambassadors may be fired at will, and it would have been easy to adjust the terms for a politician so that he was employed on the same basis as a minister.

Failure to do so ended up being expensive. It cost the taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds when Mandelson was sacked, if not the whole £75,000, and was an irresponsible oversight. A different government may well have wanted to remove a political figure, especially one as controversial as Mandelson, and would have not wanted to bill the taxpayer for the privilege. The experience of recent years proves that you cannot just assume that a government will continue until the end of its five-year nominal term of office.

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